faith. family. food.

Rainy May

Greetings! It seems to be a very rainy May. We’ve recently had some pretty severe weather pass through Iowa leaving us with a few fallen branches. Thankfully, nothing terrible and we’re all safe. We have experienced far worse storm damage since we moved to our little home in the country.

We have also been very busy working on our garden. I have planted, and replanted, seeds because we all know how successful I am at growing them. My oldest daughters planted my zucchini squash and pea seeds and they are the only ones growing so far. Everything I have touched is not growing. So, that probably means we’ll be buying plants soon.

Along with nothing I planted growing, we have some kind of critter digging around in our garden and leaving big holes. It all started in February, which was unseasonably warm, and my girls planted some old potatoes (kind of a science experiment to see if they’d grow.) I have no idea who this guest is, but I wish they would kindly leave. (And, if you are curious, yes, the potatoes are growing. I honestly didn’t think they would. Probably because I am not the one who planted them. Hehe.)

We also bought the last of our fruit trees for our property. We know they take a couple of years to grow before we will get any fruit, so I thought the sooner we get them in the ground the better. We have quite an array of tress – apples, pears, peach, cherry, and plum. We have been buying a couple of trees here and there, but this year we went all out and bough the rest on our wish list. We ordered a few from Stark Bro’s Nurseries & Orchards Co. It was pretty exciting to get trees in the mail and I cannot wait to see how they grow.

Along with the trees, we also ordered strawberry plants, blueberry plants, and asparagus. The chickens totally ruined my strawberry plants last summer so they needed to be replaced. Don’t let anyone fool you – chickens are horrible gardeners. 🙂 Fingers crossed they can leave them alone this year. I also have never had luck with blueberries, and we just love to eat them, so I am really hopeful they will grow and we’ll get a lot of berries.

So other than that, our spring is off to a pretty good start. The girls are waiting for summer and their activities to begin. In the mean time, it’s a lot of movies and popcorn while we wait for drier weather.

I’d love to hear from you! Do you have any tips or tricks for a successful garden? Bonus if you can tell me how to start a garden from seed successfully.